Swallow

by Theanna Bischoff

  There was an old lady who swallowed a goat

  Just opened her throat and swallowed a goat!

  She swallowed the goat to catch the dog.

  She swallowed the dog to catch the cat.

  She swallowed the cat to catch the bird.

  She swallowed the bird to catch the spider

  That wiggled and jiggled and tickled inside her.

  She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.

  I don’t know why she swallowed a fly

  Perhaps she’ll die.

  &When Carly had too much energy to burn, I would lie with her on our backs on opposite ends of the couch and put the soles of my feet against hers. She still had baby soft feet with round toes. Then I would pedal my legs, the motion carrying through to Carly’s legs, so that we pedaled in tandem, opposite leg forward and opposite leg back.

  “We’re a cassette tape, Car,” I told her, showing her how the wheels turned around when she put her Raffi tape in the cassette player. “If you keep turning, you’ll hear the music.”

  She would pedal and pedal, and I would sing to her, her favourite songs.

  Alouette, gentille Alouette

  Alouette, je te plumerai

  Je te plumerai la tête

  Je te plumerai la tête

  Et la tête

  Et la tête

  Alouette

  Alouette

  Oh-oh-oh-oh

  Alouette, gentille Alouette

  Alouette, je te plumerai

  “What does it mean?” She stopped her feet mid pedal.

  “What does what mean?”

  “The song.”

  “It’s French, I don’t know what it means.”

  Curious, that Monday, I asked my teacher if she knew what the lyrics meant in English. She told me she’d write them out for me while we worked in our small groups. After class, she slipped me a piece of paper with her neat little scroll.

  Little bird, lovely little bird

  Little bird, I will pluck your feathers off

  I’ll pluck the feathers off your head

  I’ll pluck the feathers off your head

  Off your head, off your head

  Little bird, lovely little bird

  Little bird, I will pluck your feathers off

  &In Toronto, I wore headphones to the grocery store and avoided the pleasant chatter of the cashier, stocked my cart with peanut butter chips and cocoa powder so that I could bake with my mother. The first batch of cookies we made went runny in the oven and formed a giant super cookie with edges like the petals of a flower. Carly had been particularly bad at baking — too impulsive to follow recipes, too eager to lick spoons and improvise by adding ingredients. Often, she confused baking soda and baking powder, or sugar and salt, and on more than one occasion, she’d left confections in the oven, forgot to set the timer, and moved on to other tasks, until the kitchen oven breathed furious fog from its mouth and the fire alarm let out an anxious shriek.

  In the evenings, I went running, surprised that my body remembered how to run from the days when I’d run away from lonely nights without Patrick. Running made me high. Adrenaline rushed through my veins and arteries and my body ached — a reminder that I was still alive. I pushed myself, frantic to run farther and faster each night. It became habitual, literally putting one foot in front of the other. I showered the sweat and grimy Toronto air off my body each night later and later, into the early morning hours, fed Kipling and collapsed into bed, sore at the points where bone met muscle met bone. I slept late in the mornings until I could no longer ignore the sun’s insistence.

  My mother ate everything we baked.

  “Good thing I got my appetite back!” she sang. I could see the bits of soft baked pretzel in her mouth. I politely spat mine into a napkin, swallowed to try to rid my mouth of the overwhelming taste of garlic salt. By February, she’d gained twenty pounds, and I’d lost thirteen. Carly had been dead for three hundred and fifty-two days.

  &Had my mother succeeded the first time she tried to kill herself, Carly and I would have, effectively, been parentless. Would we have gone back to our father? Stayed with Papi? Gone into foster care?

  “Did you have a will?” I asked Mom, from the kitchen table, while she dumped a cup full of flour into batter without sifting it.

  “I don’t need a will. Don’t have any money. Don’t have any kids to take care of. If I die, you just cremate me and put me in a cardboard box. I won’t care. I’ll be dead.” She turned the beaters on, and noise and flour spouted up from the bowl, into the room.

  “When we were kids, I mean,” I yelled over the noise, getting up and coming closer to her. “Did you have a will when Carly and I were little?”

  She flicked the switch, squelching the sound.

  “Didn’t have any money back then, either. Get me some vanilla.”

  &I thought I’d go out for a bit, pick up some ingredients for breakfast. I wandered to the corner store and bought a loaf of basic, whole wheat bread and a litre of 1 percent milk. When I got back home, the bowl was still on the table, beaters leaned against it. Crusty batter glazed the silver blades.

  “Mom?” I put the milk down. “Mom?”

  Her bedroom door hung ajar. I pushed my way in.

  She lay on her stomach, her face sideways. I could see her back moving, a regular pattern. Inhale. Exhale. I tried to do the same.

  Back in the kitchen, my cell phone blinked at me: one missed call from Joel. Joel called just to talk, a trait Aubrey had disdained when her previous boyfriends did it, calling it “clingy” and “needy.” Three days earlier, Joel had called to say he’d met Conor’s new boyfriend, Michael.

  “He made risotto — I had seconds.”

  I fluffed up the pillows behind my head. “Sounds better than what I’ve been eating.”

  “He seems like a nice guy. But the motorcycle and leather jacket thing. . .I dunno, don’t you think it’s a tad cliché?”

  Cliché. He sounded like Patrick.

  Each time he phoned, Joel asked how long I planned on staying in Toronto, and when I planned on coming “home.”

  I covered the bowl with Saran Wrap and called him back.

  “Hi,” he said. “How’s your mom?”

  “She’s okay. Fine. Except when I came home and she wasn’t in the kitchen, and I flipped out.”

  “You flipped out?”

  “She’d fallen asleep. I just thought. . .you know.”

  I’d taken my mother out to breakfast that morning at a diner at Yonge and Eglinton. Our table reflected in the mirror behind her head. There echoed the two of us, wearing lifeless sweaters, huddling around our coffee mugs, just trying to stay warm.

  “And you?” Joel asked.

  “And me what?”

  “What have you been up to?”

  “Doing my mom’s laundry, making sure she takes her medication on time. Making sure she goes to her therapist every week.”

  He coughed. “How’s work?”

  “Okay. The pay is pretty shitty, but it’s enough, anyway.”

  “Are you full-time yet?”

  “No, just three days. I can’t really be out of the house any more than that. I mean, the meds are helping, but I’m still. . .”

  “You can’t work from home?”

  “No, there’s a probation period; I have to be in the call centre, for now, anyway.”

  During my last shift, a potential customer had blown a whistle loudly into the phone and yelled, “Take me off your list, asshole!”

  “Do you miss teaching?” Joel asked.

  Did I? “I guess.”

  “Both my parents were teachers, did Conor ever tell you that? Runs in the family.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yesterday, my mom suddenly announced she’s ready for grandkids.”

  “Mm hmm.”

  “Conor thinks it’s funny. I don’t see his boyfriend hopping on that bandwagon. And I see enough kids at work, you know? Have you talked to Conor l
ately?”

  “Uh. . .I think a week ago?” I’d rounded down. When I started counting, I realized I actually hadn’t talked to Conor in over two weeks.

  “Did he tell you he showed a video in Health class about first aid, and one of the kids fainted because it showed blood?”

  I smiled. “I could probably guess what kid he’s talking about.”

  I could hear my mother upstairs in the kitchen, the slam and then whir of the dishwasher closing and starting. Check.

  “One time, when we were kids, Conor wiped out pretty bad on his bike, you know, skinned knee, bloody nose. We were playing in the ravine — a good half hour from the house — so I tried to patch him up, but by the time we made it home, we were both so covered in blood my mom said she couldn’t tell which of us was actually injured.”

  “Carly used to get hurt a lot,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” I picked at some grime under one of my fingernails. Batter? Dirt? “Anyway, Joel, I should probably go, I have to work tomorrow.” My shift didn’t start until noon, but whatever.

  “Oh, okay. Yeah, it’s getting late there. Sorry, I always forget about the time difference.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “By the way — ”

  “What?”

  “Happy Valentine’s Day.”

  Happy. That was one word for it.

  &As though he’d been my ex-lover, and not my sister’s, I kept tabs on Ryan. After the funeral, I’d phoned daily for a week. I needed to know. Had he had any idea? No. Had she left any other messages? No. Had they had any contact?

  “No,” he said. My phone battery chirped its forthcoming demise. “You told me not to talk to her,” he reminded me, as though I needed reminding. “She called a lot. But I didn’t answer. I didn’t crack.”

  He carried the other half of my secret the way Aubrey and I had each worn half of a BEST FRIENDS heart on a necklace for a week in middle school before she declared it cheesy and stopped wearing hers.

  After moving out of the apartment he’d shared with Carly, Ryan put school on hold, moved from part-time to full-time at the restaurant, and rented a small, two-bedroom basement suite. Two bedrooms, I imagined, so he would have a room for Autumn. I couldn’t tell whether he was not, as Carly had feared, in a relationship with Autumn’s mother. I didn’t feel comfortable asking him outright.

  His answers to my questions didn’t change.

  Initially, he picked up after one or two rings. Then, my calls started rolling to voicemail.

  Hi, you’ve reached Ryan. Leave me a message.

  As simple as that.

  I searched his name online, but didn’t find anything. When I searched Jessa’s name, I couldn’t tell which profile belonged to her. One Jessa Ryce had a user photo of a little girl in pigtails and sunglasses. Ryan had told Carly Autumn looked just like him — but I couldn’t see the child’s face from behind her shades. The rest of the photos were blocked.

  For all I knew, Jessa could have moved in with Ryan — Jessa and Autumn both. I pictured the three of them, a little family, Mommy, Daddy, child. The family neither Carly nor Ryan had ever had.

  Sometimes I detoured on my way home and walked past The Upstairs Basement where I was pretty sure Ryan still worked. I’d gone a few times to visit Carly during a shift, sitting at the bar and dipping warm pita into their specialty dips: red pepper hummus, roasted garlic and spinach, and Brie fondue. The smell walking by reminded me of my sister, but I could not go inside.

  One evening, a few weeks after I’d settled back in Toronto, I walked past an elementary school, my arms straining to carry heavy grocery bags. About a hundred feet away from me I spotted a dad and his young daughter. I stopped, still holding my groceries. They wore bulky winter coats; the little girl had matching pink mittens and boots. The father pushed his daughter on the swing. She rose away from me, then swung back. Away, and then back. I could hear the trill of her laughter, like a bird oblivious to the cold.

  I moved a few steps closer, put my groceries down on the sidewalk. Ryan? I couldn’t see his hair, tucked underneath a dark grey toque. The swing slowed down, and he scooped the girl up under her armpits and placed her back down on her feet.

  “Catch me, Daddy!” she challenged him, beginning to run away from the play structure. He waited a few seconds before starting after her. I put my hands up on the chain link fence surrounding the school, a bit shocked by the coldness of the metal.

  Just as she came closer to me, the girl slipped on an icy patch of snow and stumbled chest first into the ground. She paused upon impact. Her father caught up to her a few moments later, at which point, she began to cry.

  When he scooped her up, I saw his face.

  Not Ryan, after all.

  &Joel received a subpoena to go to court to testify about the parenting skills of a client of his, having worked with both the mother and her four-year-old son. At eighteen, he told me, she’d had a brief relationship with a bartender at the nightclub where she worked as a waitress. The relationship didn’t last very long, and when she missed her period, she went to her doctor and had him run a pregnancy test, which came back negative. A month later, when her period still didn’t come, she went back to her doctor and had him re-run the blood work. Again the test came back negative. Two months later, she experienced spotting and abdominal pain, and went to the ER, where a nurse ran an ultrasound and discovered that the woman had been pregnant the entire time. She was, by that point, almost halfway through her pregnancy. But, reassured repeatedly that she was not pregnant, she’d continued waitressing at the nightclub and indulging in her lifestyle, frequently drinking on the job and with her friends. Her son arrived six weeks premature, with symptoms of fetal alcohol syndrome and a seizure disorder. The young mother became embroiled in a legal battle against her ex-boyfriend’s parents, who wanted to terminate her parental rights and adopt the boy themselves. Joel had been asked to give his opinion on her fitness as a parent, or whether her lifestyle had endangered her son’s life.

  “I always knew I might have to go to court someday,” he admitted, over the phone. “I know a lot of people who’ve been practicing for years and have never had to go. I hoped to be in that group. Sounds naïve, but I’m kind of freaking out. I’ve always hated public speaking.”

  “Make Conor go in your place,” I suggested. “He loves public speaking.”

  “Yeah, somehow I don’t see that working very well.” Joel laughed. “Hold on, I’m going to go grab some juice. My throat’s getting dry just talking about having to testify.”

  When he came back to the phone, I said, “Did I ever tell you my father was a twin?”

  “Really?”

  “Well, kinda. The other twin didn’t live. Stillborn.”

  “That’s really sad,” Joel said.

  “Not as sad as growing up together and having his brother die later. At least this way, he never knew.”

  “True. But psychological repercussions can happen from loss at any stage.”

  I had a blister from running on the back of my heel. I pressed hard against it until it popped. It hurt more than I expected. “So what are you going to say?” I asked.

  “About what?”

  “At court.”

  “Well, I don’t feel the blame should be put on my client — she got a test as soon as she missed her period, medical professionals told her the tests came back negative; she did what lots of eighteen-year-olds do. She’s taking care of the baby now, she comes to counselling regularly, she stopped drinking as soon as the pregnancy was confirmed. She’s trying her best. . .plus, she feels horrible. The last thing the court should do is take away her kid. She’s going to already have to live with her guilt for the rest of her life. If only she’d known earlier. Sorry, you probably don’t want to hear all this.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “When’s the court date?”

  “Thursday. It could get pushed back, though. Depends what happens with the other witnesses,
I guess. I’m hoping it’s just over and done with on Thursday. I don’t want to have to cancel any more of my client sessions. Plus, there’s this other thing I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a conference on childhood trauma in Toronto — second week of May.”

  “That’s just after my birthday,” I told him.

  “Right! Well, I thought if uh. . .maybe if I came out, if you might want to have dinner or something. I’ve heard great things about the food in Little Italy.”

  Eating out meant more time away from my mother. At home, I could make food and make sure she didn’t kill herself at the same time. I could craft actual meals now, meals that tasted half decent; a meat, a carb, a vegetable. Dinners that would have made Patrick proud. “Yeah, Little Italy’s good.”

  “Yeah? That’s what I heard, so. . .”

  “Yeah.”

  I wandered out of my room and up the stairs, peered into my mother’s room. Still sleeping. Check.

  “So. . .okay, so, what do you think?” Then, “Oh, great, I just spilled juice all over the carpet.”

  My eyes felt itchy; I’d left my contacts in too long. “What kind of juice?”

  “Um. . .sorry, it’s just everywhere. What?”

  “If it’s apple, it probably won’t stain that bad.”

  He laughed. “Apparently being nervous makes me a klutz. If we have dinner, I promise I won’t spill anything on you.”

  &On days off, and when my mother slept or knit or baked, I wandered up and down Bloor and its side streets, Carly’s cherubic ghost traipsing after me like a dawdling child, compelled by the battered Tim Hortons cups of homeless people collecting change, distracted by the soulful tunes of street buskers. I smelled the smouldering flesh of sausages pressed into a grill and heard Carly begging me for a toonie and two quarters so that she could buy some “street meat.” She used to joke that the way to tell when it was spring in Toronto was when the hot dog vendors appeared. Spring. Already spring? Soon, summer would creep up on me, too. Summer, fall, winter, spring. More and more days without Carly.